The Great American Column
Rosenblatt, Roger
The Last Picture Show and The Next The Last Picture Show has been a success for a long enough time by now to be considered fair game for some unfavorable comment. I'm not particularly interested in...
...The French Connection is supposed to offer a realistic depiction of police work because it is ruthless...
...But in rushing to manufacture those antitheses the makers of the movie have omitted the only question in this business which would interest us: is the harsh reality of the present a logical consequence of the fragile glory of the past, or, if the gloriousness of the past is itself all bunk, is the harsh reality of the present a logical consequence of maintaining the sham...
...The past is good and the present is bad...
...and a cast of a thousand virtues...
...But the central idiocy here is the notion that one is interpreting something by being for it or against it (which side are you on anyway, stranger...
...No, the fault of the movie lies simply in its ambition...
...The Last Picture Show is meant to be a work of criticism and as such it makes the same basic mistake which most of our cultural criticism makes, and has always made, which also happens to be the same mistake the reviewers made in declaring the movie important...
...Movies have pulled this kind of stunt for a long time, usually in the name of somebody's conception of reality...
...How can there ever be a last picture show...
...The Last Picture Show thinks that it is saying something about the decline of the West and of the American spirit, and that it is illustrating the end of American romanticism to boot...
...The song which has been twanging throughout the movie is "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used to Do...
...Nor is the town what it used to be (14...
...Emblematic of all the antitheses is the last picture show itself, a John Wayne Western...
...The particular side The Last Picture Show takes is that of the past glory, real or imagined, of the golden West, against the harsh reality of its present...
...Let someone contend that the West has gone to pot this year, and next season someone else will come out with The Last Picture Show Runs Again, starring John Wayne, Jr...
...Nor, when it comes down to it, do we seem to want to be so bothered...
...Even that old time religion is dead...
...It is at the heart of the trouble with The Last Picture Show (which chooses between the "lightness" of sitting tall in the saddle, and the "rightness" of declaring that we shall have no more picture shows), and it is at the heart of the trouble with our criticism, our journalism, our art, our politics and us...
...There is no Great American Dream, nor Great American Nightmare...
...with the heart of gold, we are presented with (7) a foul-mouthed fat whore stuffed into the back seat of a car, ready to do quickies for change...
...Instead of showing us the standard tavern bar-girl-songstress-(prostitute...
...When the last reel flips off the spindle and the house lights blast on, so breaks the connection between eras...
...We have come to expect severe changes as well, revolutions, counter-revolutions and antitheses...
...Each considers some aspect of the national culture, and character, not as an intellectual but as a moral issue and therefore is more concerned with being right than interesting...
...3) The girl in question, no Rhonda Fleming, is a grasping little moron headed in the example of her mother (not Beulah Bondi either), a bigger grasper, though less of a moron...
...Instead of the strength of the community resting with The Little Guy, it sits squarely with The Rich (15), the ones who struck oil, and who now, rather than heading further west (16), only want to become Eastern, suburban and upwardly Mobil...
...The heroine's virginity, a necessary if unmentionable factor in the early Westerns, is here considered a liability (4), for which the girl apologizes to one of the local villains (5), and for which she sloppily makes amends (6...
...Instead, it is merely saying that the decline of the West has occurred and is itself an illustration of the fact that our romanticism is stronger than ever...
...2) His loyal side-kick is neither loyal nor honorable...
...That, and a various and complicated people, filling out their lives in a two hundred year-old democracy, trying to make a go of it, and of their own best wishes...
...Thus the neat antitheses, to demonstrate how the mighty have fallen...
...The sin which this movie commits is the same sin which American cultural criticism has committed from its beginnings: it takes sides without establishing a context of understanding...
...When the hero's side-kick goes off to the army he leaves the hero his beat-up jalopy (13), horses not being what they used to...
...For those of you who have yet to see it, the picture is made up of a series of antitheses which are meant to be, and are, instantly recognizable: (1) Our modern cowboy-hero is introduced to us not as a winner, but as the inept quarterback of a losing high school football team...
...It is this substitution of a facile sense of morality for real sense which is at the heart of the trouble...
...So it goes...
...He is also the literary editor of The Alternative...
...Needless to say, both voices are the same voice...
...The town's spokesman for God is not the kindly old parson, nor the surprisingly tough and handsome young one, but a pimple-faced creep (17) who is picked up by the police for abducting a little girl whom he wanted to look at with her drawers down...
...I'm not particularly interested in The Last Picture Show as a work of entertainment, though I enjoyed it immensely, but I am interested in its failure as a work of criticism...
...If it's bad enough for Hollywood, it's bad enough for us...
...Patterns was supposed to be a realistic expose of the business world because it was unhappy...
...Her customer in the movie is the conventional Western cripple, in this instance not the valiant misfit who proves his mettle in the Great Attack, but (8) a wretched mute who sweeps the streets and is killed, not in a real stampede, but by a cattle truck (9), whose driver is sore that the kid got in his way...
...Equipped with right instinct, he does not need to bother himself or us with reasons and qualifications...
...There is only The Great American Column...
...Roger Rosenblatt is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Expository Writing program at Harvard University...
...The hero finds love, or a comfortable facsimile, with his coach's wife, and vice versa...
...So can the multitude of its reviewers who perceived in the picture an important message about American civilization...
...This is the way it is with us: devils or seraphim, bearing the full weight and power of the country within ourselves alone, feeling individually capable of defining or speaking for the national character when we are not even sure such an entity exists, deciding that when we are good we must be perfect, that when we are bad we need redemption, in short, behaving as melodramatically as our movies portray us...
...We either listen to those who persistently wring their hands and moan that there is no culture in mechanized, materialistic (and oil-based) America, nor can there ever be, or to those who continue to light up like pin-ball machines at our every product, finding in our manifest cultural destiny the future of mankind...
...Please don't tell me that the movie wasn't meant to be criticism, because I can prove you wrong...
...It does not cry romantically that all is wild and wonderful on the Western front...
...None of our so-called realistic movies, any more than The Last Picture Show, is a true work of criticism...
...It is he who will tell us what is worthwhile (good, good for us, to be liked) in our culture and what is not (evil, harmful, to be scorned...
...In other words, how and why did our town arrive at its last picture show...
...Without answering or even posing that question The Last Picture Show becomes what it is, another Western...
...To say that nothing shocks us anymore admits to our availability to be shocked, but the deeper truth is that we would prefer shock to understanding or exploration, because shock is a condition of the moral man...
...There is no Great American Novel, nor Great American Hero, nor Villain, nor Tragedy, nor Way, nor Past nor Future...
...John Wayne rounds up his wagon train of pardners and golden-hearted girls and gets a move on, while our two midnight cowboys barely acknowledge the fact that there will be no more picture shows for them...
...It cries romantically that all is dead...
...At the same time it is patently clear that the movie is also watching the two boys, present disintegration and the trumped up glory of the past facing each other without a twinge of mutual recognition...
...The fact that all of these elements are obvious does not mean that they are ineffective...
...The coach knows all about their liaison, but that's all right (12) because this is a Western of opposites...
...The critic, then, the man of taste and discrimination, becomes chief among moral men...
...The inside dope which is regularly being thrown at us on doctors, lawyers, cartographers, actuaries etc., is inevitably the inside dirt, though, of course, all that these stories do is to substitute one form of absolutism, or wishful thinking, for another...
...The hero and heroine get married, only to have their marriage annulled immediately after the ceremony (10), which is fine with the heroine who only wanted to get married for kicks anyway (11...
...It's the song of the new lone prairee, nobody loving anyone or anything like they used to do, nothing being as it was...
...So it has been all along in our cultural criticism and elsewhere...
...What passes for criticism in them is merely disapproval and what passes for disapproval (because this kind of disapproval always connotes and supports the right ideals) is essentially a form of celebration...
...Following the ritual of movie-going the hero and his side-kick sit alone in the dark theater on its last night of operation watching the grandeur that was Texas from the waste-land that is...
...in a fight over the local teen-age Beauty the side-kick rams a pop bottle into the hero's eye...
...According to every generation or demi-generation, the quality of our books and music, our styles of dress, our manners, our language and various ethical codes have all been shot to hell, and we are not shocked...
...As the years accumulate, we repeat balefully and looking backwards, that nothing in our culture or national life shocks us anymore...
...If the roles depicted in The Last Picture Show are superficial and built upon transparent prototypes, the actors do not seem to be aware of their model and therefore play their parts with great earnest innocence...
...The reason we are so worried about not being shocked is that we have come to expect shocks and enormous surprises as part of our cultural history...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
